Tristram Zedex Eighty One

I’ve got a new article up at Rooster Talk. It’s brief and to the point and says that, basically, what British general elections need to sex themselves up is private jets and helicopters. Read it here.

It took me coming to the Communist People’s Republic of China to see it, but it’s true: money CAN buy you happiness. Or at least that’s what the Chinese think. It can certainly buy you relative happiness; like the joy that became me when I invested 129RMB (9 quid) in a brand spanking new coat to combat the harshness of China’s -5degC winter. (I had landed with a suitcase full of thin bright T shirts and shorts; perfect for beach hopping Australia and New Zealand but I might have looked a tad out of place bearing the skin of my legs and forearms in Beijing’s icy streets).

I landed on February 6th, the New Years Eve of the Chinese calender. When my plane crossed into Chinese air space the view was fantastic - sprawling cities below covered in the random patchwork of a thousand fireworks exploding in the night air. This also meant the walk from the taxi to Tom’s house (a school friend who is studying here for a year)  was like being in a de-militarized zone. Regular readers may notice I often make flippant comparisons to life during wartime (Glastonbury for example, in reality anything but), but Beijing on Chinese New Year really is. Fireworks are constantly let off on every street corner resulting in a cacophony of bangs and machine gun-esque clatter . We had to approach Tom’s front door under constant cover, car by car, doorway by doorway, scared in case I got mauled by a stray firework before I’d even put my backpack down after the trip from the airport.

To mark the beginning of the Chinese year of the rat (incidentally, me and my 1984 cohorts are rats), Tom and I stuck a poster on his front door displaying 福 (the Chinese character for wealth). This wasn’t to wish it upon the neighbours, but to wish it upon ourselves. The next day as I took my first roam around China’s capital, Tom explained to me that the Chinese don’t understand the term ‘money can’t buy you happiness.’ For them, it’s a fact: you simply can. It’s interesting that in the Capitalist west we make phrases like ‘money can’t buy you happiness’ and in the Communist East they feel the opposite is true. But then, we have to believe the opposite to cushion ourselves against life’s inevitable failures, something our Commie cousins don’t have to do.

Happy Chinese new year everyone, and remember: Money can buy you happiness. But only if you live in a country that restricts individual capitalist gain.

China is known for it’s freedom of speech the way Iraq is known for it’s political stability. So it was with a certain amount of panic that I reacted when the customs card on my flight to Beijing asked me if I had about my person ‘any political materials that are against the public good and contradict the laws of the People’s Republic of China,’ or some such jargon. I shat my pants; I had with me two magazines of highly incendiary and subversive nature - The Economist and Time. If I had just one, maybe I could get away with it - but two?! They’d probably have my arms broken and strung up in a rural prison quicker than you can say “Chairman Mao was a big poo-poo head!’

In the cold sweat of panic, I did what any sane person would do. I ditched those magazines in the seat in front of me and calmly exited the plane, wiping my brow to hide my unease. Five minutes later I was outside the airport without so much as a frisk. When Tom greeted me, he found my reaction to the customs card hilarious, all the more so because you can actually buy said magazines in China, something proved a few days later when we visited a book shop. That’s $17 I’ll never get back. In my defence, I was still a bit shaken from the $220AUD fine slapped on me for not declaring my ham sandwich in Sydney. That’s the world we live in, folks, a world where the armchair critic criticisms of the Economist fly in China, and two slices of bread and a ham slice are met with the long arm of Australian immigration law.

My atheism and lapsed Catholicism, has left me with a fear of death, the consequence of an acquired absence of belief in a tangible heaven. Driving through the South Island I was, as I’m sure many were, upset by the early demise of talented actor Heath Ledger. His intense performance in Ang Lee’s moving romantic drama Brokeback Mountain hinted that this former pin up could well have had the acting chops to be the next Marlon Brando. Trailers for this summer’s blockbuster The Dark Knight indicate his could will be a performance that is either entertainingly manic, totally disturbing, or both - but either way impressive. As with, I assume (as I was too young to be concerned by) the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley, and countless others before my time, Ledger’s death is an untimely end to a career which had just started to show massive promise.

Thinking about this, life, death, all things in between and the number 42, I asked Amanda, who was driving at the time, what she thought comes after death. She thought for a brief second or two, then said, “Lots of fun things. Trampolines.” I may be an atheist, and the greatest minds in history have struggled to come up with a satisfactory answer to that question which has plagued us since the dawn of humanity, but it’s hard for me to argue with that kind of brisk optimism.

Death: Fun things and trampolines.

In Alex Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach, a trippy tale of backpackers looking for paradise and finding themselves in an island Utopia turned hellish nightmare, the central character tells the reader he doesn’t take photos because the resulting collection of images ultimately replaces the actual emotional travel experience in your memory. Or something like that. I haven’t read the book in years. I’d like to say I’ve taken a similarly anti-technology way of experiencing the world on my recent travels. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m principally travelling so I can look cool on Facebook, with ostentatious  pictures of me grinning gormlessly in such striking visual landmarks as New Zealand’s Remarkables, India’s Taj Mahal and Vietnam’s Halong Bay all taking their turn to be the picture of choice on profile page. What was that about emotional experience, Alex?

My lack of disconnection from the technological world is evident every day of my trip, whether it’s the fact I’ve probably spent about $300 using the Internet since I landed in Australia on November 18th, or being depressed for three days after getting sand in my camera lens leading to all my pictures being punctuated with huge blurred blotches on New Zealand’s summer skyline, to spending hours painstakingly removing said blotches on Paint so I can upload the photos onto Facebook and still impress. The lack of comments on these pictures only shows that is not happening.

Nevertheless, here are the final set of photos from my trip in New Zealand. I land in China on February 6th, so depending on how just how great the Great Firewall of China is, you might not hear much from me in the next two weeks. But I’ll try.

Above is Legolas’ POV in The Two Towers as the Wargs begin to attack; just before the bit where he does the spectacular leap onto the horse. In real life there’s a fake Korean prison right next to this hill; it was used in the 1988 film The Rescue. We couldn’t get access because they’re currently filming the new X Men film; more annoyingly, Hugh Jackman was due on set, but not until the day after we left town.

My name is Aidan, and I have a problem. (Quiet applause). I’m an addict. (More quiet applause). But it’s not alcohol, drugs or prescription medicine that I’m hooked on. It’s the United States presidential elections and boy, if I don’t get some primary stats in my veins quick, I might explode. (Yet more quiet applause. Fellow election junkies pat me on the back, several people murmur “well done, Aidan.”) It took a lot for me to admit that.

If you want to know what my trip to Australia and New Zealand is really like, you’d best click here and read my return article for Club Relaford’s monthly political magazine. It explains the addiction that has plagued me since I landed in Cairns nearly three months ago.

(And for the record, it wasn’t my idea to put ’the great Aidan McCaffery’ under the article photo. I, appropriately, look pale and ill, like a drug user…)

What’s the most expensive sandwich you’ve ever eaten? I don’t think I’ve ever forked out much more than what you pay at Subway for a 12 incher. Until today that is. As part of my adventure through continents, cultures and cuisines, the new figure for my most expensive sandwich ever stands at  $220AUD, or about 101GBP, depending on
the exchange rate. Below is a breakdown of the content of my sandwich.

INGREDIENTS:
Ham (cost: $1.27NZ).
Ranch salad (cost: $2.20NZ).
Wholemeal bread ($1.15NZ).
Margarine ($2.20NZ).

So what’s the secret ingredient? The $215 seasoning that made the sandwich so expensive? The budget busting extra that would make most vacuum walleted backpackers blush with economic embarrassment? Well, the clue lies in the fact that the sandwich ingredients listed above were paid for in New Zealand dollars, but the extra cost was paid for in Australian currency. The extra ingredient, folks, is… not declaring said ham sandwich to customs before I got off my connecting flight from Auckland to Sydney.

And to top it off, I didn’t even get to eat it. So I’ll never know if that sandwich, put together after a trip to NZ budget supermarket Pak ‘n’ Save and packed with the hearty filler of an Australian customs fine, was even worth it. One can only imagine.

For those of you who haven’t already seen it on Facebook, here is a video of me having a go on a canyon swing, and then swearing loudly.

I have updated the below post, ‘Through the Haast Pass and Beyond,’ so it now includes photos of our trip round New Zealand so far, most notably of our treks through and over the Abel Tasman National Park and Franz Josef Glacier, respectively. Enjoy.

I haven’t updated this blog much in the past week because I don’t have anything interesting to say. New Zealand is not India, a country that inflicts a permanent state of manic depression on it’s visitor. It is not Vietnam, with it’s socialism disguised behind numerous advertising billboards and stock market ticker reels. It’s not Australia, with its racist cheese. It’s New Zealand, and the most interesting thing you can say about it is that it’s beautiful.

Literally, everything. There is no town I have been to thus far that doesn’t have a spectacular view of a mountain. The whole place is essentially the Lake District multiplied by ten. Amanda and I rented a car (which I inevitably named the Mand Aid Wagon) on January 11th and have since driven from beach to beach, national park to national park and glacier to glacier, all the time watching the landscape around us alter in slight and extreme ways, but all along the way getting more beautiful. AND we’ve only done the south island. AND we haven’t seen any sheep yet. (I think that old adage about there being ten sheep to every New Zealander is more a statement on the low population density than its high number of sheep).

While driving through the Haast pass, a stretch of road that passes through two different lakes, both so awesome in their beauty you feel like you have the world’s leading cinematographer controlling the light inside your retina, we tried to name a thing that was bad about this country. All Amanda could think of was that there isn’t a clubbing scene, but in light of such natural wonder, that doesn’t really matter. All I could think of is that I’ve had toothache for about a week now, but that has nothing to do with NZ and more to do with the fact I haven’t been to the dentist in four years (not my fault; I blame the NHS. I even took the liberty of grassing it up to the Americans) and the diet of full sugar coke and chocolate sparkles that I have lived on ever since.

New Zealand, we love you. And here is some photos of us loving it.

And now to Glacier Country…